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Tuesday, 30 June 2015

This is an initial proposal for the flyby sequence that shows the city I built in Autodesk Maya for the project "The What If Metropolis". With this, I cna find out what buildings need to be obscured, what needs to be covered and what needs to be moved about in order to get a smooth view.in a flight towards the opera house.

I have been on a sizeable hiatus lately, realising that I may have burned myself out working on the composition for Fantastic Voyage. Recently however I recieved a message from Phil asking for a possible pan-through of my digital set for the What If Metropolis project, I distinctly remembered during the brief that he wished he could move the camera and approach the opera house. Which fortunately gave me some vigor to work.

The first task was to streamline the scene. When I made the single frame for the What If Metropolis presentation it took roughly 45 minutes to render one frame using the university computers. Thus my first task was to streamline the rendering process so that it would not take an entire day to make half a second's worth of motion. Fortunately I was in luck with this as after optimising the scene, deleting unused rendering nodes and shrinking down the files used in the textures, I managed to cut 45 minutes (which on my home computer could have been closer to 52 minutes) down to 14 minutes. Theoretically tripling the number of frames I could make a day.

The next stage might be to rearrange a few things as despite all the work I put into the image, I had arranged it all to the point that the positioning was specifically for this shot.

I might also take what I learned during Fantastic Voyage and separate the scene into layers for ease of rendering. For one I might be able to cut down rendering time more if I isolated the opera house (the msot light-heavy thing in the scene as it has a ton of point lights that eat up render time) and put it on a separate layer.

Wednesday, 3 June 2015

I am a fan of the Fallout franchise, so when Bethesda launched their promotional site for their new game earlier today I got the chance to watch their new announcement trailer as it was released to the public. And I immediately fell in love with it as the camera panned around a house that alternated between its pre-and post-apocalyptic state, while this beautiful and very well-rendered dog (the trailer was in-engine, something that is becoming increasingly popular as ingame and cinematic graphics more closely match each other) explored the post-apocalyptic remains.

What drew me to this particular scene was my love of the German shepard, which featured prominently in the trailer. I thought the dog was adorable so I felt compelled to make a piece of artwork featuring him and it gave me a great chance to practice painting fur and eyes.

Monday, 1 June 2015

These have been sitting on my hard drive for a couple of days now, as the summer break has not entirely left me with nothing to do; with this, the painting ideas, Maya tutorials and development of personal concepts. As of right now, three months feels like it might not be long enough for everything I want to do.

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Mark Stamp

What drives me above all else is curiosity in what worlds and beings are possible with the virtual space.

Cities symbiotic with the jungles that surround them, biomechanical insects and exotic beasts from the wilds of unseen planets, I love the freedom digital creation gives and what comes of it. A landscape, a person, a machine, a symbol and more can all be characters. I embrace this in all work done and things created. The greatest moment is when months of hard work comes convincingly to life.